Past events | Innovation

Headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and with research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands, Taiwan and the USA, an rep offices in China and Japan, imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of about 4,000 expert scientists, to drive open innovation across the globe. They unite world-industry leaders, Flanders-based and international companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers, for R&D in nano-electronics and digital technologies, including advanced semiconductor scaling, silicon photonics, smart health, smart energy, smart mobility and smart cities solutions, artificial intelligence, beyond-5G and sensing technologies and more.

Next to its R&D offering, imec also leverages its expertise and large international industry network to support smaller organizations that have limited in-house R&D resources as well as larger companies with their innovation process from initial idea to fully functioning product, from the design of a product or chip, to prototyping, testing and optimizing, and manufacturing.

Finally, imec supports tech start-ups and scale-ups with a tailored offering. The imec.istart program is a business acceleration program that provides tech entrepreneurs with specialized coaching, facilities and overall support to help them grow their businesses, while the imec.scale-ups program focuses on larger innovative tech scale-ups looking to conquer the European market.

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Commissioned by the Flemish government, Lantis is building connections that make the city and region flourish. Lantis is responsible for the realisation of the Oosterweel connection, which will increase prosperity and improve the quality of life. Lantis is contributing to this by promoting mobility, including the construction of numerous bicycle connections and multimodal junctions on the city outskirts of Antwerp.

Lantis strives for operational excellence in order to carry out projects as efficiently as possible and deliver quality. Thanks to intensive cooperation with the surrounding area, the organisation works transparently and with a focus on results. Innovation and transformation ensure future-oriented projects with a lasting impact on the dynamics of the region. This is the Lantis way of successfully realising large projects in an urban environment.

Lantis stands for Liveable Antwerp through Innovation and Cooperation and is a public limited company. The day-to-day management is in the hands of the management committee led by managing director Luc Hellemans. David Van Herreweghe chairs the board of directors.

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As Europe’s second-largest port and largest integrated chemical cluster, the Port of Antwerp Bruges is a major lifeline for the Belgian economy: annually around 238 million tonnes of international maritime freight are handled. The Port of Antwerp Bruges accounts, directly and indirectly, for a total of around 143.000 jobs and more than €20 billion added value.

Innovation and digitisation enable our mission to be ‘a home port for a sustainable future’ as we aim to flexibly respond to a rapidly evolving maritime market. By supporting The Beacon, we want to ensure that our port platform finds relevant points of contact and vice versa. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the exchange effect created through the ecosystem being built around The Beacon.

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The city of Antwerp welcomes businesses, researchers, citizens and city officials to experiment with smart technologies that aim to make urban life more enjoyable and sustainable. Antwerp is a living lab where solutions are tested and co-created with its inhabitants. The city is home to highly innovative businesses and with 171 nationalities that live in Antwerp, it is above all a very diverse, and international city. The Ecosystem in Antwerp is developing rapidly, over the past years the amount of start-ups and scaleups in Antwerp doubled.

Innovative companies are the driving force behind the Antwerp knowledge economy. Their growth is crucial for our future. The City of Antwerp therefore strongly believes in the power of digital networking and is developing an ecosystem for digital innovation in which large and small businesses, startups, scaleups, researchers and capital providers with an interest in the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence can meet each other. Thanks to the cross-pollination that occurs in The Beacon, innovative products are developed that are relevant to Antwerp’s ‘smart city’ ambitions and to our financial stakeholders: industry and logistics.

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The University of Antwerp is a research university where pioneering, innovative research is conducted at an international level. Research and education are closely linked, with 20,000 students and 6000 staff spread across our nine faculties. As a driving force in the Antwerp innovation ecosystem, innovation is a constant focus.

The Beacon is the university’s pioneering pre-incubation structure for the domain of Metropolitanism, Smart City, Mobility & Logistics. It houses the IDLab research group and the Design Sciences Hub.

The IDLab research group of the University of Antwerp and imec performs fundamental and applied research on Wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. IDLab, headed by prof. Steven Latré, targets the most daunting challenges industry is facing to deliver digital transformation, connecting everything and extracting high value from data. Bringing researchers and industrial partners together at the same location facilitates knowledge transfer and enables the cross-fertilization and co-creation insights on smart cities, IoT and AI towards the industrial partners in The Beacon.

The Design Sciences Hub of the Faculty of Design Sciences is an interdisciplinary innovation and valorization lab. They offer design solutions for urban challenges and wicked problems in the triangle of urban planning, built environment, and urban health.

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Smart Asset Inspection Demo Day

Innovative technology and digitisation have led to spectacular developments in the use of robotics, drones and ROVs for asset inspection and maintenance. As part of the Smart Industry Week, BEMAS & The Beacon organized the Smart Asset Inspection Demo Day on Thursday 24 November.

Next to attending several presentations, visitors could discover and watch demos of a broad range of maintenance & asset inspection robots, UAV’s, ROVs, crawlers, platforms, solutions and services.

Expert Team Meeting Smart Port Week

A community meeting to discuss the topics/activities of the Smart Port Week

Slush Helsinki

Slush is the most ambitious and well-known startup and technology festival in Europe. All tech companies should attend Slush at least once in their startup or scale-up phase. Together with FIT (Flanders Investment & Trade), we planned a visit to Sluch. It was truly inspiring to meet many fellow technology companies, building solutions for Smart Ports, Smart Cities and Smart Industry.

On Friday 18/11, The Beacon and Port of Antwerp-Bruges (PoAB) hosted a side-event during the Slush conference, at which the latter presented its digital twin to an eminent group of attendees. Companies like Rombit and Awake.ai attended and showcased their smart port technology during the meet&greet section of the event.

COOCK Smart Ports 2025

North Sea Port and the COOCK Smart Ports 2025 consortium invite you to an inspiring workshop on how data connectivity and Artificial Intelligence can lead to innovative logistic services for the port and its stakeholders. In an interactive session, speakers from academia, private companies and port authorities will share their view and expertise. There will be ample opportunity for questions, answers and networking.

Digital Tech Career Day

Young talent is one of the most precious commodities nowadays. The Beacon Community joined forces with University of Antwerp, SINC, Karel de Grote Hogeschool, BeCode, AP Hogeschool and A Seat At The Table (ASATT) to link young talent with ambitious and growing technology companies.

We invited students in their last year and recently graduated job seekers to our headquarters, where they were able to meet with The Beacon Community Members. With a minimum effort, the latter was able to put their company in the picture.

This event is focused on young potentials enrolled in an IT or similar technical study program (e.g. developers , multimedia...)

Smart Mobility Week - Tunnel of the Future

Lantis is one of the six founding partners of The Beacon, has its office in The Beacon Building and manages one of the largest public infrastructure works in Europe: the Oosterweelverbinding. More than a mere tunnel, the Big Link is a huge infrastructure, mobility, environmental ánd societal project that impacts Antwerp and all its citizens.

Sustainability is at the core of what Lantis does. It also means that the result of project should be future-proof. And that's why Lantis has supported the establishment of The Beacon: to learn how to use technology to strengthen and improve their construction and mobility project, and to make it sustainable in the long run.

As a first step, Lantis has launched an innovation challenge, that we've worked around, in a lively and moderated cocreation session!

Smart Mobility Week - Autonomous vessels vs. vehicles vs. drones

Autonomous vehicles are catching the limelight, but did you know that our region is pioneering in terms of autonomous vessels and drones as well? In this seminar and debate, we gave the floor to 4 experts who illustrated a concrete use case, and dug deeper into the technology that enables autonomous transport.

What we talked about?

Which technologies enable autonomous transport?
What are the current possibilities, and what are the limits?
What is the state of play of pilots, use cases and eventual commercial use?
What can the shipping, autonomobile and drone industry learn from each other?

Smart Mobility Week - Mobilidata

Imec and a selected number of partners have been working for several months on the ground-breaking platform for mobility data and application, called Mobilidata. At this event, Imec shared the progress they've made, and engaged in an interactive co-creation session with technology providers and mobility experts, to define new use cases that can be built upon the Mobilidata platform.

Smart Mobility Week - Smart Ways To Antwerp

The City of Antwerp is a front runner in terms of innovative mobility. On the first day of the Smart Mobility Week, the Vice-Mayor presented the policy, strategies and main innovations he installed in the city. But the work is never done! In the afternoon session, we hosted a co-creation session in which we brainstormed about technology solutions to tackle two big mobility challenges our City has!

Expert Team Smart Industry

A community meeting to discuss the topics/activities of the Smart Industry Week

Tall Ships Races

The Beacon was offered as a base for the young sailors of the big ships, to relax, call their families and enjoy our magnificent sky terras. In return, we were offered a unique tour on one of the ships before the public opening.

Visit to the Port of Liège

We brought the community intelligence of The Beacon to Liège for a meeting on smart ports and logistics. We got to connect with the Liège Port authority and MUPOL, and visited some sites like the DPW container terminal, covered dock of the port of Monsin and the multimodal platform Trilogiport.

The Beacon Summer Festival

To reward our community and welcome the many new community members, we organised a casual Summer Festival with a cocktailbar, winetasting, VR-games, a delicious BBQ and relaxing dj-beats.

Visit to the Port of Zeebrugge

The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge recently merged into Port of Antwerp Bruges. The perfect opportunity for our community to learn about the sea port of Zeebrugge. We learned more about the Port activities, 5G strategy and projects, and the use of data and AI in the Port ecosystem. Afterwards, we made a super interesting bustour through the port environment, where we ended at the largest car terminal in the world, ICO.

Mississippi Delegates

The State of Mississippi is known for its magnolias, catfish, bluegrass music, and southern charm....but its second largest city - Gulfport - has quite an important port right at the Gulf of Mexico.

On Friday May 13th, a large delegation from Mississippi - including private companies & corporates - visited the Antwerp port & innovation ecosystem. And they will stop at The Beacon for a meet & greet with our community members.

Community Night @ SPACE - The Human Quest

City of Antwerp kindly invited the startup & innovation communities in Antwerp to the brand new SPACE - The Human Quest exposition. Great turnout with many Beaconeers enjoying Europe's most fascinating space exhibition, entirely organized and curated by the team of Startups.be | Scale-ups.eu.

Together we take it to the next level

Missed an event?

Missed an event?

Smart Asset Inspection Demo Day

Expert Team Meeting Smart Port Week

Slush Helsinki

COOCK Smart Ports 2025

Digital Tech Career Day

Stay informed!

Smart Mobility Week - Tunnel of the Future

Smart Mobility Week - Autonomous vessels vs. vehicles vs. drones

Smart Mobility Week - Mobilidata

Smart Mobility Week - Smart Ways To Antwerp

Expert Team Smart Industry

Tall Ships Races

Stay informed!

Visit to the Port of Liège

The Beacon Summer Festival

Visit to the Port of Zeebrugge

Mississippi Delegates

Community Night @ SPACE - The Human Quest

Smart Asset Inspection Demo Day

Expert Team Meeting Smart Port Week

Slush Helsinki

COOCK Smart Ports 2025

Digital Tech Career Day

Smart Mobility Week - Tunnel of the Future

Smart Mobility Week - Autonomous vessels vs. vehicles vs. drones

Smart Mobility Week - Mobilidata

Smart Mobility Week - Smart Ways To Antwerp

Expert Team Smart Industry

Tall Ships Races

Visit to the Port of Liège

The Beacon Summer Festival

Visit to the Port of Zeebrugge

Mississippi Delegates

Community Night @ SPACE - The Human Quest